The apparent-time construct as a proxy to spoken conversational data in the 20th century

Abstract

The 20th century is characterized by important changes in the sociohistorical context of Spain, which have led to the steady process of colloquialization of Spanish, in both spoken and written language. Still, these major developments contrast sharply with the scarcity of oral conversational data. This paper investigates whether the apparent-time construct offers a solution for the data problem. According to this method, a linguistic phenomenon is analyzed across the speech of different generations during one time period. The basic assumption is that differences between generations mirror historical developments in language. This study investigates whether generational differences in the use of the Spanish pragmatic marker sabes ‘you know’ correspond to the grammaticalization cline previously observed in real-time data.